We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.

~ Sir Arthur Eddington

Sleight of Hand
by Kate McQuade       

My first time with Houdini,
he kept finding things within me
I never knew were there:

a dime inside my ear, a trembling
butterfly in my hair, a rainbow
string of handkerchiefs erupting

from my dress, all these ecstasies
of color I hadn't felt against my skin.
He knew just where I'd hidden

his handcuff key beneath my tongue—
knew before I knew, and plumbed
it carefully from those depths.

It's when he pulled a bunch of flowers
from his sleeve that I was finished:
sweet-faced orchids, bursting dahlias,

birds of paradise as pink as apples.
You try, he said, and when I felt the inside
of his wrist, it felt like roses,

and when I felt the inside of his mouth,
it felt like spaces saved for keys.
I guess I should have seen it coming.

Still, when he escaped sometime
between that night and waking, it felt like
the truest magic: there one minute,

wrapped in limbs as tight as chains,
and gone the next, the echo of his disappearance
like a cricket in an empty theater,

like the world's stopped and all that's left
is this violin of loneliness.
Of course I took him back again, and then

again; there's something about the first time
you see magic, feel the unreal brush against
your eyelashes, the rapture of enchantment

as misleading, as irresistible, as love—
and don't we all fall for these illusions?
He still comes by. He's older now,

his hands familiar, his body slight.
He looks for flowers in his sleeve,
but more often than not, they're just old

handkerchiefs he's misplaced
or cross-eyed jacks of Spades,
and once, tragically, a disheveled

rabbit we hadn't seen in days.
He reminds me of my father now,
how he'll reach inside his shirt pocket

for glasses or a pen when they're never
there, never where they should be,
how he has to look away from me

as he grabs at the empty space
above his heart. Sometimes Houdini cries,
and when he disappears, it feels more

like death than some miraculous escape.
I'll lie beside his cool pillow at night,
thinking how time is cruel even

to those who conquered it once:
spun it bright and golden as a coin,
trapped it like an insect in their hands

and made it sing. But that's the thing
about our bodies—they were never meant
to levitate, to be split in half like apples

or a heart. He keeps coming by,
and I'll keep taking him to bed,
but I suspect he isn't here for me.

His hands are shifty and bereft,
eyes more wandering than he admits,
as if he's lost something and hopes

it might turn up, sudden as a dime
beneath the sofa, or the house key
you discover exactly where you left it.


is the actor  ~sirobnaiv





Lucifer
by Dean Young

You can read almost anything
about angels, how they bite off
the heads first, copulate with tigers,
tortured Miles Davis until he stuck
a mute in his trumpet to torture them back.
The pornographic magazines ported
into the redwoods. The sweetened breath
of the starving. The prize livestock
rolls over on her larval young,
the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs
of the clockworks. I would have
a black bra hanging from the shower rod.
I would have you up against
the refrigerator with its magnets
for insurance agents and oyster bars.
Miracles, ripped thumbnails,
everything a piece of something else,
archangelic, shadow-clawed,
the frolicking despair of repeating
decimals because it never comes out even.
Mostly the world is lava's rhythm,
the impurities of darkness
sometimes called stars. Mostly
the world is assignations, divorces
conducted between rooftops. Forever
and forever the checkbook unbalanced,
the beautiful bodies bent back
like paper clips, the discharged
blandishing cardboard signs by the exits.
Coppers and silvers and radiant traces,
gold flecks from our last brush,
brushfires. Always they're espousing
accuracy when it's accident, the arrow
not in the aimed-for heart but throat
that has the say. There are no transitions,
only falls.


Yamba *afugatt